The UN challenges five centuries of cartography(www.not-ship.com)
30 pointsby speckxan hour ago8 comments
  • jsLavaGoat5 minutes ago
    80% of the human population lives in the northern hemisphere, but closer to the equator.
  • kspacewalk224 minutes ago
    Robinson projection is a good enough, boring compromise, if the UN was interested in that.
    • tensor23 minutes ago
      No one needs a compromise. The world (except the US) agreed to use this new map together. It's not a conflict.
      • jsLavaGoat4 minutes ago
        "The world" is not represented by the UN General Assembly. Did you vote for your representative?
      • mdp202116 minutes ago
        Somebody who does not represent anybody "agreed" - not us.
        • tensor7 minutes ago
          I'm Canadian. Canada represents me. They voted on this. That's how the world works. Sometimes my government is not the one I voted for and my interests are not represented, or sometimes my interests are not the majority in my country. That's life.

          No one is forcing you to use the new map, you can keep your old map. No one will arrest you for it. Enjoy!

      • nisegami8 minutes ago
        Representing a 3D sphere-like surface on a 2d plane definitionally requires compromise.
    • flexagoon12 minutes ago
      Here's an image I made to show the difference between Robinson and Equal Earth:

      https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_of_Equal_...

      Whichever you prefer, what matters is that we should all just stop using Mercator.

    • Apocryphon5 minutes ago
      I could’ve sworn that Robinson had already replaced Mercator by the ‘90s, so I was surprised to see defenders of the latter.
    • atoav22 minutes ago
      Why would the world feel the need to compromise when all UN countries, except for one agree on the projection. The solution is simply to ignore the minority, especially if it has a government that itself has always refused to compromise with others.
    • neuronexmachina5 minutes ago
      [dead]
    • EA-316714 minutes ago
      If you look into the sponsors of this change it’s nothing more than a political stunt for a primarily domestic audience. The rest of us will forget about this and either use globes (all of our phones come with that feature after all) or a projection that maintains the value of perpendicular lat and long.

      Speaking for myself political stunts don’t really bother me unless they have a real impact, and this case is pathetic rather than damaging.

  • rkagerer26 minutes ago
    It's great they want to find a projection that better represents the real geography, but at the end of the day you're still trying to unwrap a sphere onto a rectangle. Personally I feel the schools mentioned here would get better mileage out of buying (more) old fashioned globes, and encouraging the kids to learn geography that way.
  • AlexandrB34 minutes ago
    What's the material difference between this and Trump's "my button is bigger"[1] nonsense or the renaming of various bodies of water? I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.

    My personal favourite equal-area projection is something like Boggs eumorphic[2] because it doesn't distort the east and westmost polar regions quite as badly. The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand, not whether it flatters the correct countries.

    [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42549687

    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggs_eumorphic_projection

    • dgellow27 minutes ago
      The main difference is that the UN didn’t force anything and isn’t unilaterally deciding what projection to use. The countries decided together to use a new default when showing the world map, that’s it. You can still use whatever projection you want, nothing will happen to you.

      > it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.

      That’s literally what the UN is for. The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts. It’s a forum for countries to discuss and agree on things, in practice that means mostly symbolic decisions pass. Which is fine, symbols and defaults matter

    • neuronexmachina24 minutes ago
      > I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.

      This is kind of personally embarrassing, but due to seeing Mercator maps all the time growing up it wasn't until later in life that I realized that Greenland isn't actually a gigantic landmass the size of Africa.

      > The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand

      Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.

      • jubilanti2 minutes ago
        I'd bet a lot of money that Trump and all the others pushing for a U.S. "liberation" of Greenland also think it is a similar size to Africa, not 1/14th the size.

        Africa is 14x larger, but near the same size on the maps our leaders have grown up with for 80+ years.

        This has clearly influenced geopolitics. Which is the point of the UN. Which is just a container for what the countries of the world want to agree on. When the UN "doesn't work" for some thing it is because the countries of the world don't want to work together for that thing.

    • sb05721 minutes ago
      >I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.

      Symbols are arguably the most important aspect of geopolitics.

      • EA-316712 minutes ago
        Yeah… the US condemnations of the Axis powers is what really turned the tide, joining into the war later was really a post-script right?
    • erxam22 minutes ago
      It's not the most pressing issue in the world, but long-term, maps do shape conceptions about the world that we don't personally know. So it might be symbolic, but symbols are powerful.
      • EA-316711 minutes ago
        That must be why we all live in awe and fear of giant, mighty Greenland.
        • erxam5 minutes ago
          The fact that Greenland looks so big and impressive in a Mercator map has probably influenced Trump's obsession with taking it on some level.
    • frieseke17 minutes ago
      The UN is a body that is intended to facilitate global cooperation. This symbolic change better represents the body's members and updates an incorrect visualization, which leads to better cooperation and representation.

      Trump's renaming changes serve his own whims and selfish ego, they perform the opposite effect and hinder global cooperation.

  • GolfPopper19 minutes ago
    Obligatory xkcd:

    https://xkcd.com/977/

  • varispeed8 minutes ago
    Not sure why UN is taken seriously today. Isn't that a club of corrupt drunkards who meet from time to time to fart in their chairs and spout nonsense?
    • pphysch2 minutes ago
      Who is taking it seriously? The unipolarists clearly don't, and the multipolarists have been busy building alternatives for the past couple decades.
  • lordloki8 minutes ago
    "And since we often, without thinking, use size as a proxy for importance or power, this subtly reinforces a sense of northern superiority over the global south."

    We also use position as a proxy for importance or power, so perhaps they should flip the map over as well. /s

  • hn99330236 minutes ago
    [flagged]